Give Me Your Hand

by Megan Abbott

  What if, I wondered in bed every night, someday I dreamed of something like that?

  But other times, it all felt so far away. And seeing all the one hundreds on Diane’s grade sheets, and that thing Ms. Steen said about maybe she should just hand over the class to Diane—sometimes it seemed impossible. The Severin and everything else.

  “Maybe it’s not for me. Maybe I don’t care enough,” I told Diane after a rough lab full of screwups and my forgetting to preweigh the flask, throwing off our results. “Not like you do.”

  Watching her in class, the way she knew the answer to every question, and the complication to every answer.

  “Kit, let me show you something,” she said, opening her laptop.

  The screen lit up brilliantly. It was a series of short films shot with high-definition cameras—simple chemical reactions, but magnified, intensified, until they became magical explosions.

  “This is my favorite,” she said, showing them adding zinc metal to a lead nitrate solution. In seconds, a silver-tipped winter forest from a fairy tale emerged.

  “They put it in a soft gel,” she said, “to preserve it.”

  The gel’s bubbles looked like giant globes.

  We watched again and again as the glinting and intricate forest seemed to paint itself before our eyes, the simplest of chemical reactions.

  If you’ve never seen it, you should.

  “Dr. Severin has these cameras in her lab,” Diane said. “These are from her lab. The Severin Lab.”

  By this point, her name had become like an incantation.

  “You can do it,” Diane said. “Science is facts and results. It’s not messy. It’s precise.” She placed her palm on the cover of her AP Chem book. “Everything makes sense here. It’s the safest place.”

  I looked at her. “For people like you.”

  “But you are like me, Kit. You’re just like me.”

  NOW

  We’re running across the parking lot, Alex grabbing for my hand, me tugging my bra back up under my shirt.

  Then we’re inside his car, and Alex insists he can drive—he was at least one Long Island Iced Tea behind me, and did he even finish his second?—and I say I can walk home (“Like the beginning of every true-crime show ever. They’ll find one of my shoes and a barrette gleaming in the dirt”), but he seems to be driving anyway.

  We’re only a mile from my apartment, after all.

  “You did the right thing,” he’s saying, and I’m nodding and nodding because I think he means letting him drive me home.

  But in that moment, his head turning slowly—like slow motion, like a movie—I have a full and complete vision of something else, something I’d been missing. It’s gone before I can hold on to it.

  In the soundlessness of his car—the quietest I’ve ever been in except the time I drove the provost’s tipsy wife home in her Town Car after the Breaking the Magnifying Glass Ceiling women alumni reception—I sit back, watching all the lights of the city scatter across me, and everything is slow, voluptuous, beautiful.

  My stomach lifts at the sight of Alex’s ragged linen cuff over the gear shift. The heedlessness with which people like Alex wear such fine clothes; ink jab, acid spray, what does it matter?

  Alex glances over once, twice, his long and graceful hand reaching for my leg, fingertips grazing the inside of my thigh with such ease, the ease of a single man in a hand-harvested linen shirt driving a car that pipes cool air the minute the ignition strikes and makes no sound even when coasting above all the pots and pits of Route 310 as we near my apartment, all the Quik Lubes and Sunless Tan-o-Rama and Family Doctor Here and Party Dawgs that beat a golden path to my home.

  What if it were always like this? I wonder. A whole life like this, with cars that always run and never make a sound, a life with savings accounts and heavy glass bottles of Italian water and organic milk in the glass-doored fridge, a life where there are family homes with spare rooms and tablecloths on long rollers, and Christmases in family cabins and always-new computers and the latest quantitative software and an aunt who knows the head of the PharmaTherapeutics Research unit at Pfizer and a college friend who edits the Journal of Biological Chemistry…

  …and waking up mornings with a smile pressed into a pillowcase, spiderweb-soft, because he’s there and his ceiling has never leaked once and the Journal of Biological Chemistry would be happy to accept the article and meanwhile, a French-press plunger gently plunges in the kitchen and then he’s right there, palm to mattress, grinning and saying, By the way, while you were sleeping, Dr. Severin called and she would love to take you to La Belle Vie for pâté and rosé and to talk about your future.

  But then the moment passes, and we pull into my pockmarked parking lot, and experience tells me, even through the golden haze of Long Island Iced Teas, that none of those things will happen, and the only guarantee is that, in seven to ten minutes, I’ll have this grinning man in my bed and maybe it’ll pull me, for seven to ten minutes, from the leachy hold of the lab and PMDD team selection and the long, unlovely corridors of the Severin Lab, the click-clicking of the HEPA filter, the ventilation blowers, and most of all, maybe it’ll pull me from the hold, more than a decade old, of the seventeen-year-old girl standing in that far corner of my head, the one glaring at me, needy, full of thunder and consequence.

  We stumble up the steps, Alex’s foot catching on the downstairs neighbor’s ashtray forever resting on step three to the right. The tin clinks and ashes scatter. His arm around me, his hand tickling my torso, finding any bare space of skin.

  My keys are nowhere in the all-purpose dump of my purse, flash drives and hand sanitizer, tampons and gum sleeves, Tylenol blister packs and a rubbed-out emery board, laundry sticks and a Kit Kat wrapper.

  And it’s Alex who dips a pair of fingers inside and lifts the jangling tentacles of my keys.

  It’s Alex who unlocks my door.

  It’s Alex who hoists me in the air, and my right shoe catches in the door and tumbles to the ground as he carries me inside. Across the threshold, triple sec streaked up one arm (the bartender promising he’d made that last Long Island Iced Tea “extra-long”), and what could be more romantic, blooming bruises on my shins from rassling on the Zipperz patio and—

  (In the morning, I’ll find the shoe—one of my favorite low-tops—in the hallway, its canvas tongue torn loose.)

  When it starts, all the laughing stops and everything feels rushed and mysterious. He’s so much graver in the act itself, all the smiles gone.

  If I look at you, he says, head down, it’ll be over too fast.

  I remember that, remember him saying it, when my eyes slap open, 3:00 a.m. blinking on the digital clock and a pair of dark eyes in front of me, shutting themselves.

  I remember.

  Sorry, I said after—I remember this now too. Sorry, I whispered, his hand on my pounding-pounding chest, my lungs, a hook of worry over his brow, I couldn’t catch my breath.

  No, he says, that was me.

  My hand to his beating chest, th-thump, th-thump; he’s right.

  In the dream, I’m in G-21, that narrow L-shaped room where we spend more than half our lives, a long black-topped bench snaking along the wall. The place where all my evening hours, my Friday nights, my vacations and holidays vanish like smoke. The safest place in all the world.

  But then Diane appears in the doorway, in a lab coat the color of a spleen, its sleeves so long they cover her hands.

  She’s heading toward me, walking stiffly, her arms in front of her, her legs as stiff as those broomstick arms.

  Diane, I say. You’re not supposed to be here.

  But she keeps walking, right up to me, leaning close as if to whisper something in my ear.

  When she opens her mouth, a puff of vapor slips from her lips. Apple green, sickly green, and filling our nostrils, our mouths. Its smell so sweet it hurts.

  “You were crying,” Alex murmurs from the far side of the bed, his faced turned away from
me in the dark. “In your sleep.”

  “I wasn’t,” I say. I say it twice.

  The morning comes before it should, the vinyl bedroom blinds in a tightly knotted bundle against the wall because, I remember now, at some point before the bed captured us both, I’d decided I needed to get an eyeful of the great big Lanister sky.

  Of course, I haven’t lived in Lanister since I was seventeen, even though its smells and languor sink inside me like an industrial sludge every time I catch a whiff of benzene in the lab. Or, more recently, when Mother’s Day cards fill the drugstore racks. The last time I saw its blush-red, aerosol-thick skies, I was there for less than twenty-four hours, just enough time to fill three dumpsters with family heirlooms (those magnetic photo albums from the eighties that ate away at the pictures; my toddler handprint in plaster) and drive two Lab mutts and a sad-faced boxer to animal rescue. The tickle in my throat from the sulfur, the orange flares—will it ever leave me?

  “Alex,” I say, his name fumbling in my throat, but he’s gone save for the blinking text on my phone: Morning, you. See you at the lab xo.

  The walk is bracing, the chilly expanse of parking lot after parking lot, four strip malls in a row before the far north end of campus.

  It didn’t happen, it didn’t happen, it didn’t.

  The memories come in pieces. Little bits of grit too small to pick up even with a wetted finger, too small even to hold in my gaze.

  Except this: At some point in the triple-sec-stuck night, before the bed and what we did in it, my hand on Alex’s collarbone, my voice urgent, desperate, came forth.

  Diane Fleming. My words hot and daring. Diane Fleming. Listen to me. You have to listen. She’s a killer.

  A secret I held tight so long, lodged deep in some vapor-tight box in some shut closet in my head. But then you came back, Diane. You came back.

  It’s the latest I’ve ever arrived at the lab, nearly eight thirty.

  At the end of the west hallway, I see her long before I’m ready, coffee churning high in my throat. The wine-colored coat. I’m not prepared, not even close.

  But there she is. Half enveloped by four pale lab coats: Zell, Dr. Irwin wiggling his mischievous gray eyebrows, two grad students hovering around him. All the men but Zell are taller, but still she looms larger, head dipped low, listening to them or pretending to, as they press forward, jabbering advice, offering guidance. Their hunger to impress her is heavy, embarrassing.

  Seeing her, though, I can feel my face burning, like a criminal’s.

  I didn’t say anything, I tell myself, that wasn’t true.

  “Did you hear?” Maxim asks me the minute I step into the lounge.

  I stare dumbly at him, hoping he can’t see the hangover slick on me, regret so thick it’s like a film on my skin and impossible to hide.

  “So how bad do you think it is?” he asks, close to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “How bad is what?”

  That’s when Juwon appears, sleep-creased, rubbing the scruff on his new-dad neck.

  “It’s starting,” he says. “We better go.”

  “Severin called a meeting,” Maxim tells me impatiently. Then he adds with surprise, “You don’t know anything. You know less than me.”

  “There’s a rumor,” Juwon tells me, “that they’re redoing the budget for the PMDD team. And that’s never good.”

  That’s when Alex appears down the hall.

  My wrist throbbing from the jug of water in my hand, the biggest the Quik-E-Mart had, I find myself backing away. My bleary head and the slight ache between my hips and the feeling my mouth has been sucked dry from booze gives it all a harrowing quality, like one of those old movies where the hero blacks out and wakes up with a gun in his hand and his wife dead on the floor.

  “Conference room,” Juwon says, pointing.

  Alex looks at me. “Well,” he says, hair still faintly shower-wet, the loose, buoyant face of the sexually triumphant, “timing is everything.”

  They’re all looking at me. Alex keeps trying to catch my eye, and then there’s Diane, whom I can feel approaching from thirty feet away, the swirl of scarlet.

  Moving quickly, I fiddle with my bag, its shredding plastic handles, the heft of the water jug, ignoring Alex, who looms closer.

  “It was hot a half hour ago, I swear,” he’s saying, his hand outstretched with a stained paper cup of cooling coffee. “First time I ever beat you to the lab.”

  I shake my head, try for a careless smile, the smile of a distracted colleague.

  “Hey,” he whispers, leaning close, smelling like my soap, “can we talk later?”

  “Sure,” I say, my head lifting in what feels like slow motion. “Sure we can.”

  As we wait at the conference table, I bow my head, doodling with aggressive concentration, my pen pressing into my notebook. Not looking at Alex once.

  When I was a kid, I checked out Call of the Wild from the library and inside, on one of the chapter pages, someone had drawn, with sharply pointed pencil, the most meticulously detailed sketch of a swollen penis and an enveloping vagina. It vaguely terrified me and the words beneath it (Just one squeeze and…) even more so and for a few years, until I crossed the great divide myself, I couldn’t shake the idea of sex as being this contorted, ugly thing, a gaudy cartoon.

  The big surprise came later when I learned the scariest part about sex wasn’t the swell and heave of body parts, its comic grotesquerie, but the shattering intimacy of all of it.

  How it made you feel, in your shuttered-up heart.

  “Just a quick meeting to update you all on the PMDD grant,” Dr. Severin says, glasses lowered on her nose as she looks at the piece of paper in her hand, one flimsy sheet. “I’ve been working with Finance on the figures. My good friends in Neuropsych, as usual, are being greedy.”

  My pen point rests on my paper, a blotch spreading.

  “I have my techs lined up. I’ll need a neuro postdoc for this, and maybe a neuro grad student. So it appears, looking at the numbers, that leaves me space for two of you.”

  She looked around at us, a faint twitch over her left eye. No one can say anything. Two. Only two. Is that what she said?

  “I know some of you have been speculating that I’d bring on three of you, but that didn’t come from me. We need a line for Serge. Serge is very necessary.”

  We should have seen it coming. Serge has worked for Dr. Severin forever, longer even than Maxim. I’d never seen an animal unit run with more rigor and precision, a closer adherence to rules and protocol. Sometimes you would see Dr. Severin and Serge walking together or conferring in the vivarium, dark head bent to dark head, and you had the feeling they barely needed to exchange a word. They both have a very clear sense of how things should be done. They are both relentless workers.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not kicking anyone to the curb. There’s plenty of work on Dr. Irwin’s hypogonadism grant and other, smaller projects,” she continues. “But two of you are all I need, if they’re the right two. I’ll let you know on Monday.”

  She taps the paper, a flick of the wrist. All our fates imperiled in an instant.

  “Dr. Severin,” I say, and I can’t guess what’s come over me, except the sticky syrup, last night’s renewable gift from Zipperz, sluicing up my windpipe, “do you already know who the two will be?”

  She looks at me; everyone does. Is it just me or does the pressure in the air feel like we’re all in a submarine, barreling through deep waters? “Because if so, why not just tell us now?”

  Alex clears his throat three times, and I think that’s his leg under the table brushing against mine.

  Dr. Severin continues to look at me, a pause that feels like a wink. “Bright girl,” she says.

  But she doesn’t answer and instead asks Juwon to update her on the CCK results.

  “Some balls,” Zell says to me under his breath as we walk out. “Did you really think she’d give it up like that? She likes to keep us fingers-on-the-le
dge.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m watching as Maxim hands Diane a new lab coat to replace the scarlet one. She slides it over her water-colored dress, the color of an expensive oyster, like a lick of mercury. So different from the prairie skirts and cowl necks she wore in high school. Her “apostolic wear” was what my mom called it, my mom most comfortable in cutoffs and scrub tops. My mom who told me never to be ashamed of my figure, which unfortunately never gave me much cause for shame.

  I watch her walk down the hallway, her head slightly slanted as though thinking. Diane is always thinking.

  And then I see Dr. Severin catching up to her in tight, tidy steps.

  I’ve never seen Severin try to catch up with anyone. Maybe the FedEx guy.

  “And then there was one,” Zell says, watching them too. “Sorry, Owens.”

  “What does that mean?” I say. But I know what he means. If they wanted a woman on the grant, now they had one. Why would they have two?

  “Goddamn,” Zell says, not answering me. “I’m gonna be buried in Irwin’s gonads forever.”

  I don’t say anything, turn to walk the other way.

  I stay under the fume hood most of the morning and no one bothers me.

  Two spots, and one will be Diane. If there was a “woman” spot, there no longer is.